[WBEL-devel] WBEL4 progress update

[John Morris]

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 16:57, Jesse wrote:

> In my experience, a slim DVD drive is about twice the cost of a slim 
> CDROM. Granted, we're talking about $30 here.

That is a stat I hadn't run into.  That would certainly make me pick CD
for a machine that will probably only use the drive to install, which is
the case for most 1U rackmounts.

> I actually don't have CDROMs on the vast majority of machines as well. I 
> do network installs, and so, for that, DVD would probably work fine. 
> But I still think it makes the most sense, if you're only going to 
> distribute in one media format, to use the one with widest usage. No?

Well I got to pondering it after noticing a) how easy it was to get a
DVD iso out of the existing tools and b) how much easier it was to deal
with one DVD instead of a half dozen CDs during testing of Respin2 and
now with WBEL4.  Burned an i386 and x86_64 DVD, stuck em in a standard
issue double DVD keepcase that was laying around and blammo, compact and
convienient working copies.  Then of course I burned both CDs and DVD to
circulate out in the stacks.

> If we're going DVD, why not dual-layer DVD? The cost is only a little 
> more... Blu-Ray anyone?

Well because that isn't needed yet is why.  Even WBEL4 only weighs in at
4.0GB for a DVD.  And with 4 is where the issue starts to get more
interesting.  WBEL3 is 3+3, WBEL4 is 4+4 and I'd expect WBEL5 to be 5+5
or worse.  So DVD is coming, the only real question is when.  We are
already at the point where the cost to manufacture a set of media is far
less with DVD and the hassle factor with shuffling CDs is growing.  We
are heading towards the 'horror of installing Slackware from floppy'
situation unless at some point we all 'just say no' to bloat.  That is a
rant for another place & time though.  :)

RH doesn't offer them yet so they don't think the time is right and from
the feedback it is certain it isn't time to go DVD only here.  I hadn't
went looking at what was actually shipping so I didn't know a lot of
x86_64 hardware was still going out the door without DVD read ability. 
I had assumed that since they were all fairly new that almost all of em
would at least read DVDs.

Now I guess the best answer is to feature a conspicious link to a script
to make a DVD from the CD set. Chris Kloiber's script looks like it
would do the job so long as you have plenty of space down /tmp.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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